From the Magazine

The Last Queen of Paris

Countess Jacqueline de Ribes says she’ll never write a memoir—no one would believe it. After a cruel W.W. II-era childhood, the swan-necked beauty was taught to lie by Charles de Beistegui, learned to be herself from Diana Vreeland, and has reigned at the nexus of French fashion, finance, culture, and society ever since. Chronicling de Ribes’s six decades of haut monde iconoclasm, the author learns why no label could ever fit such a dazzlingly inventive talent.

PEAK OF CHIC
Left, Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes on the slopes of Cervinia, in the Italian Alps, 1950s; right, in Christian Dior at home in Paris, 1959. Photograph, right, by Roloff Beny/Library and Archives Canada.

On the evening of December 5, 1969, the beau monde was assembling for dinners at the most elegant tables in Paris, pre-gaming for the fancy-dress party of the year, if not the decade—Baron Alexis de Redé’s “Bal Oriental.” Among the most impenetrable of these preparatory gatherings was that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the international jet set’s de facto king and queen. Dining with the elect at the Windsors’ that night was couturier Oscar de la Renta. “The first course, the second course, the third course, and finally dessert arrived,” de la Renta recalls, “and still Jacqueline de Ribes had not appeared. The Duke was furious!” Suddenly the dining-room doors opened, and in glided the Vicomtesse de Ribes. An exotic vision, the aristocratic beauty was swaddled from the pinnacle of her tasseled hat to the tips of her pointed slippers in a fantastically opulent Turkish disguise, ingeniously cobbled together by the Vicomtesse herself from three of her old haute couture dresses; organza lamé from a remnant market; and a sable cape, acquired from an impoverished ballerina. Recalls de la Renta, “It was a show. And she was the star. No one knew like Jacqueline the power of an entrance.”

The Grandfather

Jacqueline de Ribes’s instinct for arrivals is, in every sense, innate. Oldest child of the Count and Countess Jean de Beaumont, she made her entrance into the world on Bastille Day 1929—the 140th anniversary of the insurrection that had cost some of her ancestors their heads. “I was born on July 14,” Jacqueline recounted recently, during a toast occasioned by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decoration of her as a Cavalier of the Legion of Honor. “I evidently stirred up a little revolution.”

Lanky and long-nosed, Jacqueline, who would later be compared by Yves Saint Laurent to “an ivory unicorn,” was regularly mocked by her mother, Paule—an intellectual who translated Hemingway—for her unusual features and for her aspiration to become a ballerina. “My mother kissed me just once in my childhood,” Jacqueline notes. “I had the feeling always of being insecure—so I was always bumping my soul and my head.”

A fighter pilot and an Olympic marksman, her father, Jean, was “a seducer, a charmer, with a fantastic body,” Jacqueline says. Jean showed off his celebrated skills as “the best shot in Europe” at his antler-adorned hunting lodge in Alsace, where he gamely mixed bluebloods with bankers and statesmen—an unorthodox social habit beneficial to business. He “more or less doubled” his wife’s family fortune, according to a friend, derived originally from their investment house, Rivaud Group, founded in 1910. Among the most lucrative of the expanding Rivaud firm’s 100-odd holdings were rubber, banana, and palm-oil plantations in Africa, Indonesia, and Indochina.

“What saved Jacqueline,” says her friend Frederick Eberstadt, “was her maternal grandfather,” the Count Olivier de Rivaud de la Raffinière, with whom she resided for most of her early childhood. “My grandfather lived a bit like a nouveau riche,” Jacqueline recalls. “He had châteaux, yachts, racing stables, women, cars”—including a special 1932 all-terrain Citroën equipped with tank-type tracker-rollers to climb up the slopes he liked to bobsled down. During the Spanish Civil War, loyalist refugees used to cross the border, at the Bidasoa River, into France, and land in the gardens of her grandfather’s summer compound in Hendaye, on the Côte Basque. “So, from a young age, I was very conscious of war,” Jacqueline says. “But I was a dreamer, and basically optimistic.”

In July of 1939, the 10-year-old Jacqueline mobilized her grandfather’s entire household—the electricians, the stable hands, the carpenters, the maids—for a play, which she wrote, costumed, and performed with her sister. More than a diversion, the play was a desperate bid to revive the health of her grandfather, who was dying of cancer. “He was the only one who loved me,” Jacqueline says. “I begged to be his nurse—and I dressed the part, too. But nothing helped against death. When my grandfather died, I was completely lost. Then the war started—and I was almost glad because I thought, Now other people will be sad like me.”

The War

During the Occupation, Jacqueline and her siblings were sent to Hendaye with their Scottish nanny, who shortly thereafter was seized as a British national and locked up in a forced-labor camp. A French governess was dispatched from Paris to replace her—a woman so loathsome “we tried to poison her every night,” Jacqueline remembers. The children lived parentless with their guardian in the concierge’s cottage at Hendaye; the Gestapo had requisitioned the main house. The occupiers walled up with concrete the window of the children’s former bedroom and reconstituted it as a torture chamber. From her quarters, Jacqueline could hear the harrowing noises of torture.

Because the Hendaye house was surrounded by miles of beach, Jacqueline’s parents were concerned that the Americans might land there. So when Jacqueline was around 13 she was moved inland to the château of the Count and Countess Solages, in the center of France. “In the château, it was half us and half German officers. Twice a week, prostitutes were brought in for them on a truck—we saw all this. Finally, the American Army came and liberated us.”

Jacqueline completed her education inside the convent of Les Oiseaux, in Verneuil, where she was placed in charge of school plays. “I made costumes for Racine, Molière, out of paper.” Her uncle, Count Étienne de Beaumont, the avant-garde-art patron and party host, took his adolescent niece to see his friend Christian Dior shortly after the designer opened his couture salon, in 1947. “My uncle said, ‘I put lots of hope in this little girl.’ When you overcome a terrible childhood, you are ready for life. That way you are already familiar with disappointment.”

Édouard

In her 18th summer, Jacqueline attended a luncheon party at the house of an acquaintance in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, not far from Hendaye on the Côte Basque. She was sitting outdoors beneath a tree when a dark-haired fellow, carrying a tennis racket and dressed peculiarly in shorts, red socks, and purple espadrilles, dropped into the empty place beside her. “In 1947,” Jacqueline explains, “you still needed tickets to buy extra clothes.” The young man, Vicomte Édouard de Ribes, a 24-year-old war hero, had used his rations “to buy the ugliest things possible in the Basque country. But he made me laugh.” Édouard remembers, “I saw this gazelle and immediately fell in love.” Édouard asked “the gazelle” when she was departing for Paris—she was due to return to the city for her baccalaureate exams. “And the next thing I knew, there he was on the same train.”

Édouard came from a family of financiers, one of whom had been ennobled during the Bourbon Restoration for having bankrolled the infamous “Night of Varennes,” Louis XVI’s botched attempt to flee Paris in 1791. A conservative clan, the de Ribes were prudent with money and considered the Beaumonts to be excessively worldly. “We are provincial compared to them,” Édouard says.

Jacqueline’s father-in-law described her as a “cross between a Russian Princess and a girl of the Folies Bergère.”

At the time of their marriage, in February 1948, Jacqueline owned only two dresses. “I had never worn makeup, never gone to a hairdresser, never worn heels,” Jacqueline recalls. “Yves Saint Laurent used to say that every time you make a choice you die a little.… I had been so unhappy as a little girl. I thought marriage had to be better—but it was not better, it was worse. I had the feeling of being loved but not understood.” Early on, when they were walking on the Champs-Élysées, she took Édouard’s hand. He shook it loose, with the rebuff, “Don’t be common.”

The young couple and their two children lived with Édouard’s parents, in a wing of the de Ribes’ 1868 town house in the Eighth Arrondissement—the fifth generation installed there. Every night the families dined together, the men dressed in black-tie. One day Jacqueline announced to her father-in-law, the Count, that she was planning a party for January 21. “He made me cancel. He said, ‘Don’t you know January 21 is a day of mourning? It is the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI.’” On another occasion, she informed her father-in-law that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would be coming to dinner, and he protested, “But we’ve never had a divorced couple in this house!”

A longtime Jacqueline observer says, “At first the marriage seemed like a prison. Of course divorce was out of the question. Eventually Jacqueline realized that, in fact, the marriage gave her freedom.” Elaborates contemporary-art dealer Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, “When Jacqueline feels she has to break rules, she does—but never with an empty head. Nobody can put her in a cage. She is very loyal, but she is also a free bird—a bird of paradise.”

Charles de Beistegui

Early in her marriage, Jacqueline received an invitation to what would be the last of her uncle Étienne’s fabulous masquerade parties, for which, in the pre-war past, Picasso and Chanel had designed guests’ costumes; this final one took as its theme “Fashion Engravings, 1880–1910.” “You had to be married to go to these parties,” Jacqueline says. “If you were a jeune fille, you went to debutante parties, period.” Jacqueline pored through her father-in-law’s book collection—he, like Édouard, was an ardent bibliophile—and chose as her inspiration a period fashion plate of a brown-and-purple dress. “At my uncle’s party, I was sure nobody would ask me to dance. Then an old gray-haired man with blue eyes came up to me. When he asked who I was, I gave my maiden name, ‘Jacqueline de Beaumont,’ by mistake. While dancing, I corrected myself. ‘Thank god!’ he said. ‘That makes all the difference.’” The elderly gentleman riveted by the ethereal sylph was the flamboyant Franco-Mexican taste-maker Carlos (Charles) de Beistegui. A formidable collector of fine houses, furniture, and women, he had just bought and refurbished the Tiepolo-adorned Palazzo Labia, in Venice, and had international society madly scrambling to prepare for his inaugural “Fête des Fêtes” there. “So that is how I received an invitation to the famous Beistegui Ball,” Jacqueline says, “and now I am told I’m its ‘last survivor’!”

To multiply, as in a hall of mirrors, her already dazzling image, Jacqueline enlisted two Italian noblewomen, the Princesses Caetani and Colonna, to dress identically to herself, in the manner of the painter Longhi, in white dresses, full black face masks, and fantasy jewels by Mme. Gripoix, supplier to Chanel. “We arrived by gondolas,” Jacqueline says. “The princesses wanted to remove their masks, but I said ‘No!’ We had to remain three matching mystery ladies for as long as possible.”

Says her great longtime friend Reinaldo Herrera, “Jacqueline told me that she had learned to lie from Charlie Beistegui.” Jacqueline explains, “Beistegui was amoral and a great snob. Beistegui taught me the complexity of social life. I had seen so much during the war, but I was innocent.”

A veteran European scene-maker remarks, “You have to see Jacqueline against the backdrop of postwar Paris. People had been so deprived during the war, everyone was trying to enjoy life.” Adds Hélène de Ludinghausen, former directrice of Yves Saint Laurent, “It was the peak era of sports cars, of haute couture, of society at its most international, of Paris as the capital of the world.” Observes Prince Nicolas Dadeshkeliani, “Jacqueline was the queen of it all, the de Gaulle of fashion. For French culture, the last real fireworks were in haute couture. And Jacqueline was in on that boom.”

Vreeland

In the early 50s, Jacqueline traveled to New York for the April in Paris Ball, at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Ribes were staying at the Sherry-Netherland, and while Édouard attended a meeting on Wall Street, Jacqueline lunched tête-à-tête with Charles de Beistegui. Her curiosity piqued, Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, came over from a nearby table to greet her friend and meet his sphinx-like companion. “She said, ‘We’d like Avedon to take your photo tomorrow.’ The next day I went to the hairdresser. I got false eyelashes, curled my hair. When I showed up at the studio, Diana said, ’I want you to be how you were yesterday! She peeled off the eyelashes, combed out my hair. And she made me a braid! Diana Vreeland helped me be authentic. She taught me confidence. And the picture became famous.”

Avedon’s iconic cameo-like profile portrait of Jacqueline, with the impossibly long neck, exaggerated almond eyes, and improbably thick braid, was eventually published in Life and in the photographer’s anthology Observations, with text by Truman Capote, in which he famously compared Jacqueline, Babe Paley, Marella Agnelli, and Gloria Vanderbilt to “a gathering of swans.” In Life, Avedon praised the Vicomtesse de Ribes for her “perfect nose,” and added to this encomium, “I feel sorry for near-beauties with small noses.”

Jacqueline says, “Between 1950 and 1955, I figured out my style. The real change occurred between 1953 and 1954. It had to do with my eye makeup. Everyone said I looked like Nefertiti—I don’t, but that’s how I got the idea.”

Oleg

On a trip to New York in 1955, during which time she attended the Knickerbocker Ball (in a Dessès gown), she caught the attention of Oleg Cassini, who found her “elegant to the point of distraction.” Recalls Jacqueline, “Oleg said, ‘I feel you are a frustrated designer. Would you do things for me?’ I came back to Paris, to the attic of my house, and cut dress patterns on the floor. To help me out, I booked the première [head of studio] from Patou, and a worker from Balenciaga. I made the dresses only in toiles [muslins], as I couldn’t afford silk. Then I packed the toiles in boxes to send to Oleg in New York. But first I needed to glue onto each box a nice croquis [fashion sketch] of the contents inside. I couldn’t draw, so Jean Dessès proposed I hire a young Italian in his studio. It was Valentino! He came to my house once or twice a week for about a year. He drew my croquis, but always wanted to add an extra bow, frill, or flower. Valentino would complain—‘I have no money. I live in an attic, with a toilet on the other end. I am going back to Rome.’ I told him he could not leave. To be a couturier, I advised him, he had to stay in Paris. Besides, I did not want to lose my dessinateur! Three years later, Valentino opened his own couture house. I was green with jealousy. In the meantime I had closed my attic. So I went to Rome and bought clothes from him.”

Cassini, of course, was not the only New Yorker spellbound by her allure. In 1956, Jacqueline de Ribes was voted onto the International Best-Dressed List in the Professionals category; she appeared four more times before ascending to the Hall of Fame, in 1962. “When everyone still cared about the way they dressed,” says her friend Jayne Wrightsman, “everyone wanted to dress like her and look like her.” Says Countess Marina Cicogna, “She personified the international idea that French women were the most elegant in the world.” Brigitte Bardot, a compatriot who at the same moment was causing a global stir—albeit, more for what she wasn’t wearing—asked Jacqueline one night at the Rothschilds’, “Why are your photos everywhere?” Jacqueline says, “She didn’t understand how you could be a starlet in a world besides her world.”

Emilio

When Jacqueline married Édouard, she warned him that for three months of the year she would be on skis—in Megève, Kitzbühel, St. Anton, Saint-Moritz, or Cervinia, for summertime glacier skiing. Marina Cicogna says, “Jacqueline was a better skier than anyone, as good as the best men. What always set her apart from other aristocrats was the movement in her—the natural grace with which she swam, skated, skied, danced. She was the best on the dance floor in any nightclub.” Another admirer, Princess Alexander Romanov, said, “I loved to watch her do anything. To water-ski. To take off a glove. She was beyond sex. She was something not of this world.”

Emilio Pucci, who had been on the Italian national ski team, may not have agreed with the assessment that she was “beyond sex.” At the dawn of his fashion career, Pucci spotted Jacqueline in St. Anton, geared up—at a time when ski clothes were strictly functional—in solid pink, against the snow. “Emilio said to me, ‘I was asked by stores in America to do dresses,’ and I told him, ‘I know how to do dresses.’ I went to Florence, and when the hotel became too expensive, I moved into the Palazzo Pucci, on the Via dei Pucci. I designed for him linen and silk black and white evening dresses.” They traveled together to Chicago, to meet with Formfit about bathing suits, and to Dallas for Neiman Marcus. Stanley Marcus announced that “the new assistant to Emilio Pucci is Jacqueline de Ribes,” she says. “Emilio was furious, and he told me, ‘We cannot be two here.’”

Jacqueline lasted two seasons with Emilio Pucci. “He had such fantastic energy. He was the first man to wear his clothes very, very tight. He called me ‘Giraffina,’ baby giraffe.” And, to her everlasting gratitude, Pucci prophesied that if she chose, she “could walk in Christian Dior’s shoes.”

The Unholy Trinity

Exasperated, and possibly amused, Jacqueline’s father-in-law described his renegade relation as a “cross between a Russian Princess and a girl of the Folies Bergère.” Says Herrera, “The fact is there are at least 15 Jacquelines—all of them fascinating. You never know which one is going to turn up. She is a born actress. She made many parties famous just for walking in and out of them. The topic of conversation the next day was always what Jacqueline wore.” This was certainly the case in Saint-Moritz at a costume party given by Jack and Drue Heinz in 1959. The theme this time was “Come as Your Suppressed Desire.” Stavros Niarchos showed up as a Boy Scout, and Marella Agnelli arrived as Jacqueline de Ribes. “Jacqueline and I were going as Abélard and Héloïse,” Herrera says. “I wore a brown velvet monk’s habit, which Jacqueline made out of curtains. Jacqueline created her own costume out of white sheets, which she starched, and pleated around an upside-down iron coat hanger to create a wimple. It took her hours. Not only were we late, we were very late. Then Marina Cicogna arrived. She said, ‘I’m coming with you. I’m going to be an angel.’ She went to a florist and had wings made of flowers, and a circlet for her head. Meanwhile, Marina added a blue satin sash. On it she wrote ‘The Heavenly Partouze’ [threesome]. We walked in and there was a gasp!”

Raymundo

‘Whatever I did in life,” reflects Jacqueline, “it was against. Nobody ever approved.” She tried her hand at fashion journalism, writing a column anonymously for Marie Claire. She headed the international committee of the Embassy Ball, a charity fund-raiser for handicapped children. “I was always looking for a way to escape the cage,” she explains. “Sometimes I was very happy to come back home, as it was not always nice out there. But sometimes it felt like going back to school.”

The only time Édouard was “very, very angry” about her far-flung extracurricular activities, she says, “was when I took over the ballet. He could never understand why I was moving such air around.” The dance company in question was the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, established by George de Cuevas, the Paris-based Chilean husband of John D. Rockefeller’s granddaughter Margaret Strong. Jacqueline was brought into de Cuevas’s orbit in the late 50s after being summoned to dinner by the young aesthete who styled himself as de Cuevas’s nephew, fellow Chilean Raymundo de Larrain, a virtuoso decorator and set designer. With his aquiline nose and whippet physique, he bore a passing resemblance to Jacqueline.

In 1960, an ailing George de Cuevas proposed that de Larrain mastermind an original production of The Sleeping Beauty, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Not only did de Larrain’s efforts result in one of the most sumptuously refined ballets ever staged and the company’s biggest box-office success, the new show also became the first ballet in which Nureyev danced after his K.G.B.-defying 1961 defection—“a leap to freedom” that de Larrain had helped to orchestrate.

After the Marquis de Cuevas died, his wife withdrew her support for his ballet company. Jacqueline stepped into the breach as the new manager, with sidekick de Larrain as impresario. Their joint brainchild was an exquisitely ambitious remounting of Prokofiev’s Cinderella, with Geraldine Chaplin, then a 17-year-old ballet student, deposited by de Larrain in a small part to generate publicity. “I already knew her father, Charlie,” Jacqueline says. “I taught him to do the Twist.” The indefatigable Vicomtesse worked 15-hour days, her huge mane of hair tucked up beneath a foot-high Dior hat, as she no longer had time for salon appointments. “This is my way of fulfilling a lifelong ambition,” she confided to the London Daily Express. Jacqueline gave away her old Balenciagas to the dancers of her ballet company; much of her remaining haute couture collection was donated to the A.N.F., a French society dedicated to helping impoverished nobility. To subsidize the lavish ballet production, which required 250 costumes, 150 wigs, and an orchestra, Jacqueline took up a subscription from a few dozen friends—a mendicant activity that her husband and in-laws found unseemly. Yet the holiday spectacle was a sellout; soon enough her father-in-law was requesting from her Cinderella tickets for “his tax people, his lawyer, his doctor.”

The unlikely symbiotic twosome of Jacqueline de Ribes and Raymundo de Larrain was immortalized in a set of 1961 photographs by Avedon, intended, she says, “to symbolize narcissism.” After three years, Jacqueline decided to dissolve the resource-draining Ballet de Cuevas for good. De Larrain went on to photograph Jimi Hendrix psychedelically for Life magazine, and to marry, when he was 42, de Cuevas’s widow, Margaret Strong, aged 80.

Visconti

But Jacqueline was not yet finished with show business—around 1970 she co-produced three segments for French television based on Luigi Barzini’s 1964 book The Italians, and two UNICEF variety shows featuring Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Red Army Chorus. As a consequence of the first project, Jacqueline befriended Luchino Visconti, a neighbor on Ischia, where she rented a house. Visconti was then developing what he hoped would be his last film, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” Alain Delon was expected to play the narrator, and Charlotte Rampling the unfaithful Albertine, and for the prize part of the formidably witty social arbiter of Paris, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Visconti proposed to hire Jacqueline de Ribes—a bravura stroke of typecasting. “He liked the way I moved and dressed and talked and laughed,” she said. Though it is possible that Visconti would have reverted to Silvana Mangano, all casting questions are moot, as the director died before he could make his final masterpiece.

Jacqueline’s response to the youthquake reverberating around the planet in the late 1960s was to blaze a trail to the countercultural mecca of Ibiza. “Nineteen sixty-eight was my first time there,” she recounts. “It was a paradise still—very much discovered by the hippies, terribly romantic.” So enchanted was she by this raw Eden, she fought for land conservation and decided to design and construct a rustic house in the native manner, right down to the doorknobs, on the piney precipices of Punta Galera. “She was working all day long with the builders,” Carolina Herrera remembers. Explains Marina Cicogna, “Jacqueline’s gift is to know how to do things with her hands. She has real hands, without nail polish.” Says Prince Nicolas Dadeshkeliani, “The Ibiza house—c’est Jacqueline. The perfect simplicity of it cost a fortune. Even its water is amazing—she flew an engineer from Germany for the cistern!” Her cube-like house was so beguiling that she built a closed enclave of seven similar structures; even so, she still ventured out on occasion to the hot spots of the island. Fellow Ibiza pioneer Carlos Martorell, a publicist, reports that Jacqueline, several years ago, showed up in a denim mini late one morning at the after-hours club Space. “Everybody was on cocaine, pills, sweaty from the night before. I thought she would hate it. But her response was ‘Très énergétique!’” Marina Cicogna reflects, “Though Jacqueline has the manners, the language, the habits of the old-fashioned French aristocracy, she is very hip. She wanted to have a bohemian life, to live a more juvenile life. She didn’t really like it when she became the Countess—it sounded older!”

The Collection

Shortly after her 53rd birthday, on July 18, 1982, Jacqueline called a family meeting that had been a long time in coming. She informed her husband and her children that she was going into business as a fashion designer, and there was nothing anyone could say or do to stop her. Jacqueline also confided her plans to Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent. “She was a good client and friend since the beginning,” Bergé says. “She was born into that atmosphere and had the talent to create.” Yves, however, feared that she would end up suffering terribly, as he had. “We thought she was out of her mind,” Hélène de Ludinghausen admits. “But it was her dream and she did it.”

On March 3, 1983, during Paris fashion week, at three P.M. in the de Ribes town house, Jacqueline unveiled her maiden collection on 14 models from the cabine of Yves Saint Laurent, who had also lent his lighting and sound people. “No one had ever done a fashion show in anyone’s house before,” says the model Kirat Young. “And this was one of the most famous houses in Paris. Designers did not go to other people’s shows. But there was Yves, sitting in the front row with Pierre Bergé, Ungaro, Valentino, and John Fairchild.”

“It was a gutsy thing she did,” says Fairchild, then publisher of Women’s Wear Daily. “Everybody was prepared to ridicule the society lady making fashion. But she made beautiful clothes. Jacqueline’s an elegant lady with a naughty twist.”

The collection was an immediate critical and commercial hit. The signature suit, a tweed number shaped on the sides with velvet, was “copied like crazy,” Jacqueline says. “I made the suit that way because I had run out of tweed! For that first collection, I used bits and pieces.” She also used her own real jewelry, and on one particular dress her own 10-year-old Kenneth Jay Lane belt, which, because of the outfit’s popularity, Lane says, he suddenly had to “remake over and over.”

Saks Fifth Avenue signed her to an exclusive three-year contract. “They really believed in me,” Jacqueline recalls. “For two weeks during Easter, I had all their windows. The mannequins were replicas of Jacqueline de Ribes.” Ellin Saltzman, the store’s former fashion director, says, “I loved her clothes. For that time, they filled a perfect niche—they were grown-up but not aging. Her clients were the sophisticated ladies who didn’t require all the bells and whistles.”

Buoyed by stellar notices—Women’s Wear Daily bestowed its supreme accolade of four stars—and by the designer’s peripatetic rounds of personal appearances and trunk shows, the business in 1985 was already grossing $3 million annually and penetrating into more than 40 stores around the U.S., always her best market. Fred Hayman, the proprietor of Giorgio in Beverly Hills, gushes, “I wouldn’t dream of doing a season without her.” The Dynasty producer Douglas Cramer suggested to Joan Collins, his leading lady, that she model herself on Jacqueline de Ribes. Collins, in fact, wore de Ribes for her 1985 marriage to Peter Holm. Among Jacqueline’s other V.I.P. devotees were Cher, who had a midnight-blue satin dress flown in to her on the Concorde, and Nancy Reagan. The clothes in fact were perfectly suited to the Reagan-era ideal of opulent, dignified glamour. “Her evening dresses are spectacularly beautiful,” Bernadine Morris wrote in The New York Times in 1986. “ … Their shapes are lean and willowy, like the designer herself.”

“She personified the idea that French women were the most elegant in the world.”

In the same year, the Japanese cosmetics conglomerate Kanebo bought a minority stake in the company. “I’ve built the boat,” de Ribes said. “Now I want to put up the sails.” Kanebo opened a large flagship store in Tokyo, modeled after the Countess’s Paris home, where customers could even take classes in French table manners. While inspecting factories in Northern Italy, Jacqueline ran into John Fairchild in an elevator in Milan. “He warned me, ‘Be careful of the Japanese. They won’t understand you.’ I thought I needed them, but he turned out to be right.” Cristina de Manuel, Jacqueline’s business adviser, who was brought in at the eleventh hour, says, “The Japanese wanted to change proportions, necklines, sleeves, lengths. Why invest in a company if you want to change everything? The relationship didn’t work.”

Yves Saint Laurent’s dire fears were borne out. Jacqueline, exhausted and isolated, began suffering from back pains so debilitating that she wound up in the hospital. “My shareholders had an insurance contract. They were entitled to money if I missed two collections—and I was nine months in the hospital.” Eventually, Jacqueline underwent a hemilaminectomy, which left her unable to walk for three years, from 1994 to 1997. “I believe in astrology, and in my religion,” says Jacqueline, who wears a gold medallion of the Virgin Mary and a dove of the Holy Spirit around her neck. “Sometimes it seems that a dark force surrounds you. Everything bad happened at once.”

“When everyone still cared about the way they dressed,” says Jayne Wrightsman, “everyone wanted to dress like Jacqueline and look like
her.”

After the back surgery, she fell victim to celiac disease, a gastrointestinal disorder incorrectly diagnosed for years. Finally, in 2000, she checked into the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and was accurately evaluated. Meanwhile, in 1996, in the midst of Jacqueline’s medical ordeals, the Rivaud Group was subjected to an investigation by the French government. Édouard (who in 1975 had succeeded his father-in-law as head of Rivaud) and son Jean were accused of tax evasion and related fiscal malfeasance—in one judge’s words, “abuse of public property” and “presentation of fraudulent accounting.” The government levied on the de Ribes a fine of 30 million francs (around $10 million), an incredible sum to the French; even more astonishing to the public was the fact that they were able to pay it. The scandal turned into a political football, as it emerged that Rivaud was the bank of Jacques Chirac’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement. Fanning the flames of the hysteria, Paris Match ran a death knell of a story, melodramatically titled “The Sun Sets on the Empire de Ribes.” “What nobody bothered to print,” Jacqueline says, “is that after five years the government refunded” the appropriated millions.

These legal woes, in the meantime, set the stage for a corporate raid of the Rivaud Group by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Under Édouard’s stewardship, Rivaud had burgeoned to include a high-tech company (IER), real estate, and more. “The bank was just the tail of the thing,” Jacqueline says. For her, the hostile takeover of her family’s birthright was even more intolerable than the troubles that had precipitated it. “For me,” she says, “it was as if my grandfather had died all over again.”

But Édouard believed that Bolloré’s invasion was a blessing in disguise. “Édouard is not young,” she reasons. “And my son is an intellectual, not a businessman.” The de Ribes still retain a small percentage of Rivaud, and Édouard, now 87, is vice-chairman of the Bolloré Group. “He is at the office every day—to catch my husband is not easy. He thinks that he can’t catch me either. This is the secret of the couple. We love each other—but we agree we need independence. Sixty-two years with the same man is not so easy! It’s marvelous when you manage to make it work. There are so many different ways of loving. How can you know someone is the best if you cannot compare? The French attitude of marriage, couples, love, is complex.”

Édouard says, “I am a great admirer of my wife. She still looks quite nice. I am telling her all the time, Can’t you put your dresses elsewhere? She says, ‘Can’t you put your books elsewhere?’”

Chez Jacqueline

Starting at nine o’clock on the evening of her Legion of Honor ceremony last April, Jacqueline, dressed in an embroidered Ungaro vest, Armani pants, and a blouse from her own label (she is often credited with being the first to mix designers), hosts a candlelit buffet dinner for 90 at her house. On the guest list are royalty, fashion personalities, Cabinet members, intellectuals, entertainers, writers, museum heads, and billionaires. In the main salon, where cocktails are served, a blackamoor clock made for Marie Antoinette overlooks the crowd from a mantel; when the turbaned figure’s bronze hoop earring is tugged, the time appears in its eyeballs. Perpendicular to the clock are ancestor effigies by Joseph Duplessis, and near them a suave 1781 Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun allegory of the goddess-queen Juno. Above the buffet table in the dining room rise a pair of Baroque blue-and-white delft tulipières, pagoda-like receptacles for the whimsical arrangement of the Dutch flower. In this discreetly distinguished setting, Jacqueline de Ribes shows off to full advantage not only her lithe, erect figure, the prowess of her chef, and her deft ability to mingle prominent people of varying generations and backgrounds; she also puts on display her conversational skills. “Her beautiful and original phrasing, her rich vocabulary, her very correct way of speaking are all part of what the French call ‘la forme,’” says Nicolas Dadeshkeliani. “She epitomizes everything that is remarkable in France—savoir faire and l’art de vivre—the arts of knowing and of living, and she is the last one.”

Édouard, following his wife’s effervescent toast—which she delivers in her fluty voice from a high stool to protect her back—gives a speech of his own that astounds his friends and his spouse. He admits to all that his “heart still beats for her” and that he cannot let a day pass without speaking to her at least twice. “It was the first time,” Jacqueline marvels, “that he showed personal feelings in front of people.” Actress Marisa Berenson says, “There wasn’t a dry eye among the women after that speech. Jacqueline is still what we call a ‘fleur bleue’—a young, romantic girl, so pure, so idealistic.”

In his surprising toast Édouard joked that when he met Jacqueline she had only two dresses, but that “life improved a little for her, because she now has 200.” If he had bothered to conduct an inventory, as Dominique, the de Ribes’ butler, has carefully done, he would have found that the number amounts to at least double that figure. Jacqueline finally started conserving her precious purchases in the 70s, in imitation of Pierre Bergé, who startled her one day by refusing to sell her a sample because it was earmarked for the YSL archive. In the former bedroom of Édouard’s father and beyond, in the attic, her collection hangs on ordinary industrial rolling racks. Every garment is enclosed in a blue or black custom-made zippered bag, equipped with a plastic-windowed pocket into which a snapshot of the outfit has been inserted. Affixed to each garment bag are colored stickers, inscribed with numbers, that give the long sacks the enigmatic appearance of a Baldessari painting. The yellow dots, Dominique explains, correspond to the numbering system for the house. The red dots indicate the curator Harold Koda’s preliminary choices for a Metropolitan Museum retrospective on Jacqueline de Ribes, planned for the Costume Institute. The New York exhibition will be the ultimate vindication for an individual who has spent a lifetime perfecting the rarefied art of making and wearing couture, often in the most striking of possible settings—the Palazzo Labia, the White House, the ruins of Baalbek, the Rothschild palace Ferrière, Alexis de Redé’s Hôtel Lambert, and more recently the Coliseum, for Valentino’s well-documented farewell dinner in Rome.

The fastidious Dominique has committed to memory the inventory of the countess’s accessories—jewelry (including a family diamond tiara), bags, belts, and shoes, some from Manolo Blahnik, some from Nine West. Her vintage Hermès crocodile purse is studded below its clasp with a tiny coronet, emblem of her earlier title, Vicomtesse. (If the French seem inordinately attached to their titles, it is because, as with Marie Antoinette clocks, there haven’t been any authentic new ones made in 220 years.) Jacqueline also owns a pair of shoes and a belt of Marie Antoinette’s, and a jeweled headpiece of Sarah Bernhardt’s, a gift from George de Cuevas.

In the attic, in battered, labeled steamer trunks, she has preserved the elements of her costumes from the glory days of the bals masqués. Her favorites are the sable-trimmed Bal Oriental ensemble, and her artfully tattered Madwoman of Chaillot disguise, which she first wore to Hélène Rochas’s 1965 My Fair Lady Ball. The bathroom in which she conjured up some of the most exquisitely inventive toilettes of the last 60 years, if not the century, is stunningly simple. The plumbing doesn’t even work well. “It was introduced a little late to the house,” maintains Édouard. Right now Jacqueline is sitting at the bathroom’s vanity, rubbing green Shiseido cream eye shadow onto a white elliptical bead, dangling from an Ungaro haute couture belt. She has decided the bead’s original color made it a disharmonious eyesore. “This is my life,” she says, dabbing the pigment with her index finger. “Every three minutes I have to find a solution.”

In her bedroom, Jacqueline has taken out a rack of clothing, possible choices for today’s photo shoot. There is a short-sleeved black Armani Privé gown, a pair of Ungaro lace trousers, and a sinuous Jacqueline de Ribes bias-cut tuxedo-inspired column. Two maids in crisp pin-striped uniforms—giggling at the suggestion that the mistress of the house might have designed them—help the countess into the black velvet tuxedo dress. Her still-luxuriant hair, styled with the help of coiffeur Laurent Gaudefroy—“We make a duet together,” he says—falls girlishly to her shoulders. Standing transfixed before an utterly utilitarian vertical three-panel mirror, she cocks a hip and crooks a knee, evoking the classical contrapposto of a Renaissance sculpture. Shoeless, she unsteadily rises on tiptoe; sickles a long, arched foot; points it; and inserts her left hand, thumb out, in a silk-trimmed slash pocket. She rotates her head, presenting for an instant the famous profile, the coin of this realm. The practiced S curve of her body follows exactly the undulating line of the dress. In this stance—the result of a lifetime of intensive, creative self-scrutiny—she has become a living fashion sketch, animating the inert cloth in a way no professional model could ever learn. Minutes later she repeats the pose on the staircase of her front hall. “I am amazed to be doing this again,” she says from her perch. “I thought I was finished with all this! I remember Diana Vreeland used to say, ‘Pull on your neck, and swallow your cheeks!’ My grandmother told me, ‘Have your portrait done either when you’re very young or very old—the worst is the middle!’” It is uncertain at this stage into which of these three categories she feels she falls. Her step light, the long-stemmed fleur bleue turns to ascend back to her little third-floor bedroom, ready for the next change of clothes.

Jacqueline de Ribes sits on the lap of her maternal grandfather, Count Olivier de Rivaud de la Raffinière, in the passenger’s seat of his 1932 all-terrain Citroën-Kégresse Autochenille car, one of only a handful produced, while on vacation in Saint-Moritz, early 1930s. Her sister Monique and their Scottish nurse are seated in the back. Jacqueline lived with her entrepreneurial grandfather for most of her early life.

With her husband, Count Édouard de Ribes, at home in a gown of her own design, 1988. Édouard fell in love with Jacqueline when he met the 17-year-old at a luncheon party in 1947. When the couple wed the following year, Jacqueline, who would later be described by Town & Country as the most stylish woman in the world, had only two dresses in her wardrobe.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At one of the famed balls at the Château de Ferrières hosted by her childhood friend the Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, with whom she used to ice-skate, and her husband, Baron Guy de Rothschild, 1960s. Jacqueline, whose extraordinary sartorial tastes landed her in the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1962, wears a headpiece designed for the great French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and given to her by the Marques de Cuevas. Standing beside her are the Baron and the Baroness, Audrey Hepburn, and French prime minister Georges Pompidou, before he became president of France.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At the seafront town of La Baule, France, 1960, with her children, Elisabeth and Jean, whom she entertained for years with a serial bedtime story she made up about two traveling raindrops.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At her Paris studio with members of her fashion-house staff, in her working uniform of a short knit dress, 1990. Jacqueline was her own best model. Emilio Pucci recognized Jacqueline’s eye for design when he encountered her wearing a pink ski ensemble on the slopes in the mid-1950s. Pucci, who had recently started his own business, invited her to design dresses for him. After two seasons, however, their collaboration dissolved. The two remained friends, and Jacqueline went on to ghost design for Oleg Cassini.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At the finale of one of her fashion shows, surrounded by her models, mid-1980s. During her 11 years in business, the Countess received many of the fashion industry’s highest accolades. Immediately after Jacqueline launched her label, Saks Fifth Avenue signed her on, and her clothes were worn by celebrities such as Joan Collins, star of ABC’s hit TV show Dynasty.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

Jacqueline wears clothes of her own design in a press-kit photograph shot by Bill King for her fashion line, 1980s.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

Jacqueline de Ribes sits on the lap of her maternal grandfather, Count Olivier de Rivaud de la Raffinière, in the passenger’s seat of his 1932 all-terrain Citroën-Kégresse Autochenille car, one of only a handful produced, while on vacation in Saint-Moritz, early 1930s. Her sister Monique and their Scottish nurse are seated in the back. Jacqueline lived with her entrepreneurial grandfather for most of her early life.

With her husband, Count Édouard de Ribes, at home in a gown of her own design, 1988. Édouard fell in love with Jacqueline when he met the 17-year-old at a luncheon party in 1947. When the couple wed the following year, Jacqueline, who would later be described by Town & Country as the most stylish woman in the world, had only two dresses in her wardrobe.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At one of the famed balls at the Château de Ferrières hosted by her childhood friend the Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, with whom she used to ice-skate, and her husband, Baron Guy de Rothschild, 1960s. Jacqueline, whose extraordinary sartorial tastes landed her in the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1962, wears a headpiece designed for the great French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and given to her by the Marques de Cuevas. Standing beside her are the Baron and the Baroness, Audrey Hepburn, and French prime minister Georges Pompidou, before he became president of France.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At the seafront town of La Baule, France, 1960, with her children, Elisabeth and Jean, whom she entertained for years with a serial bedtime story she made up about two traveling raindrops.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At Blenheim Castle, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, 1970s. Though her father, Count Jean de Beaumont, was an Olympic marksman with a celebrated hunting lodge, Jacqueline preferred skiing to shooting. Here she takes a cigarette break with Juan Abello, James Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, and Alfonso de Bourbon, Duke of Cadiz.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At the My Fair Lady ball given by Hélène Rochas, June 1965. Jacqueline stole the show dressed up as the Madwoman of Chaillot, the character from Jean Giraudoux’s play. British fashion-and-portrait photographer Cecil Beaton (pictured here), who designed the theater and film costumes for My Fair Lady, was among those enchanted by her ensemble, which Jacqueline herself created. She wore the costume once more, and it is now preserved in a trunk in her attic.

At the Swan Ball, a charity event in Nashville, Tennessee, where Jacqueline was invited as a special guest to present her fashion collection, June 14, 1986. On the day of the event, she attended rehearsals, making sure the show ran seamlessly. Jacqueline threw herself so completely into her work that she rarely saw friends or family. She had been designing clothes and costumes since she was a little girl but turned professional only after her father-in-law passed away.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

Adjusting her logo in preparation for the fashion show at the Swan Ball, 1986.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At her Paris studio with members of her fashion-house staff, in her working uniform of a short knit dress, 1990. Jacqueline was her own best model. Emilio Pucci recognized Jacqueline’s eye for design when he encountered her wearing a pink ski ensemble on the slopes in the mid-1950s. Pucci, who had recently started his own business, invited her to design dresses for him. After two seasons, however, their collaboration dissolved. The two remained friends, and Jacqueline went on to ghost design for Oleg Cassini.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

At the finale of one of her fashion shows, surrounded by her models, mid-1980s. During her 11 years in business, the Countess received many of the fashion industry’s highest accolades. Immediately after Jacqueline launched her label, Saks Fifth Avenue signed her on, and her clothes were worn by celebrities such as Joan Collins, star of ABC’s hit TV show Dynasty.

Courtesy of Jacqueline de Ribes.

Jacqueline wears clothes of her own design in a press-kit photograph shot by Bill King for her fashion line, 1980s.